About

Hello, my name is Calin (Colin in English) Chiorean and I want to say “Thank you” for visiting my page. I was born in Romania, in Targu-Mures city (located in the Transylvania region) where I grew up, but right now I am established in Austria thanks to my job. My job (network engineer) has nothing to do with photography. I would say that is exactly the opposite of photography. Maybe that’s why I chose photography as my hobby, to do something different than engineering when I need to recharge batteries.

I started to practice photography as an amateur somewhere in 2005, I’d say pretty late, given that passion for photography started much earlier. Maybe I would not be dedicated to photography, if it wasn’t my girlfriend Ioana to support me in the process of buying my first digital photo camera: Konica Minolta Z10. Before this camera I had 2-3 film cameras, but the gift-shop type ones, which you use in vacation and that’s it.

This was the beginning. Then things started to proceed normally. I wanted to develop my passion and learn it as much. If I succeed or not,you have to tell me after you visit the pages of this blog.

When I decided to change Konika Minola Z10 with a semi-professional one, I chose the Nikon brand. Do not ask me exactly why Nikon because I do not have a clear answer. I remember looking for details about the most appropriate choice between Nikon, Canon and Pentax and it was like a never-ending story. I chose Nikon because I found the best quality / price (I think it was a promotion) and so I got a Nikon D50 with 18-50mm kit lens. Soon after, I discovered that we must invest much more to have a decent set of objectives for an amateur photographer.

Credits and my blog

[Update 3]
Retouch it’s a nice theme, but somehow it did not work after I upgrade to WordPress 3.5.2. I had the impression that it’s WP’s fault, but once I got the 3.6 version and Retouch was still not working, I had to admit that something was wrong with the theme or with the customization which I did inside the code.

I had to look for an alternative. If you search for a “photoblog” theme there are couple of them to worth mentioning, but too complex (a lot of JS, sliders, bumpers and things that for me are worthless). I still want to stick to the idea one post = one photo and minimalist theme.

I came across Photo-Biyori, a theme which is not supported anymore by developer (unfortunately), but the author still support you if you send an e-mail. The code is pretty accessible to modify or use is as it is. It works fine with WP 3.6. I did some modification to this theme, mainly visual ones, to customize it base on my needs. Let me know if you like it.

[Update 2] I did rework my blog using the free WordPress theme Retouch from Graph Paper Press, which I did adapt to fit my requests. This is an excellent theme, the code is very well written and it is very responsive. If you feel that you cannot handle Retouch theme by yourself, there is also a paid version called Retouch Pro.

[Update 1]
My Photoblog is Powered by WordPress and YAPB Based on the original template theWorldIn35mm for pixelpost rewrite for WordPress by Etrusco My journey as a photo blogger start with what I can call one of the best software to display your photos on web: Pixelpost. It was back in 2006 when Pixelpost was still supported by a large community. Time did pass and sadly the developers had no time to keep on working on this piece of code. Also the community started to be less active.

I did start looking for an alternative and for a while I had a mixed WordPress + Pixelpost blog, but that was a hard thing to manage. I did search for some time for a possible theme to replace the Pixelpost theworldin35mm template. Somehow the WordPress theme developer community cannot make a simple theme to display photos. The WordPress photo themes out there are having too many elements that distract the visitor attention from the main focus: the photo!
My idea about a Photoblog is one page = one photo. Finally, I found the same template that I was using in Pixelpost available for WordPress, thanks to Etrusco. He did port this theme from one platform to another. There were some minor issues and it took some time to customize elements so they fit my preferences, but now I have a functional blog. I want to thank all theme and plugins developers for their efforts to make their work available for free to us. I’m not a web developer or programmer so it was pretty hard to get the script to the actual format. Nevertheless if you have questions I will try to help.